Kingdom Come - Review Roundup

February 14th, 2018, 11:19

Originally Posted by Ripper
Updating entire paks unnecessarily may well be part of the problem, but I don't believe this is the fault of Cryengine, and nor is it insurmountable. Almost every game engine uses archives of some type, and it's absolutely possible to delta patch them. Pak files are just zip archives, and I doubt very much they are impossible to patch in this way.

Patching can be a tricky business, and studios often have to build tools to do it efficiently. The crude and hugely inefficient method they are using here is, IMO, testament to one more thing they haven't yet got in order.

What you believe is irrelevant. Devs said the changed stuff is much smaller and big patch is because of Cryengine. If you don't agree with that.. well tough luck. Go cry in corner or something.

Also the so called Day 1 patch was only important for console release because they needed to send a "Release" version to Sony/Microsoft 2 weeks before release. For Steam this day1 patch was actually just part of the normal game download as Steam lets you keep working on your game until last minute.

Originally Posted by Paul
The complaints about "empty" world come from people who are used to encountering bandits and dungeons every 30 meters like in Skyrim. Here the world uses much more realistic scale, it is not empty, it just uses different design philosophy than bethesda games.

I disagree. From what I have seen so far KC's gameworld does look empty and (with the exception of very few town and villages) an occasional isolated farm with a single peasant here and there or the occasional couple of bandits in the forest don't make much of a difference. It's just a personal opinion of course but I do like my gameworlds to feel alive. Do I have to mention TW3 again?

-- "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." — H. L. Mencken

That rather depends on whether what I believe is correct. But I'm not just offering beliefs - I'm trying to explain why I don't think this claim about Cryengine makes sense. Taking what a confused PR man at Deepsilver says as gospel would be closer to a matter of faith, I think.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore

Originally Posted by Saxon1974
Really hope it's not an empty world…i.mean this thing was in development what 4+ years? What the heck did they spend all that time on? From looking at the map the world doesn't look that big so I was expecting a quite detailed interesting world to move around in.

The complaints about "empty" world come from people who are used to encountering bandits and dungeons every 30 meters like in Skyrim. Here the world uses much more realistic scale, it is not empty, it just uses different design philosophy than bethesda games.

The world is not empty. I don't even understand what is that supposed to mean: empty.
And yes, the world is not Skyrim. Trashmobs don't respawn every couple of seconds nor a dragon appears every time you quicktravel somewhere.

Originally Posted by ChienAboyeur
Oblivion

No. I haven't noticed any levelscaling.

But it does change scenery and new trashmobs appear depending on your "chapter" progress.
Thus it feels more like Gothic, but this time with the most important thing Gothic desperately needed: humor.

One thing I don't like from what I've seen and hope it can be patched is archery. If there are stats regarding archery then there should be a crosshair, more accurate the better you're at it. It's the character the one with 91 archery, not the player. Otherwise, if I replay the game after I finish it, I would instantly be a master archer that never misses from the start.

If someone mods in a working magic system, I'll be in at that point. I'm not into historical sims. I like exploring gobs of locations, finding tons of loot and using lots of skills and abilities. Glad Joxer and whoever Paul is are defending it. Joxer, do you even own it yet?

I'm KS backer. 8 hours in. Of which at least one went flushed down the toiled because of a quest bug.

Defending what exactly? I'm just sharing my experience so far - I did write in another post about a few technical/engine bugs that are irritating and reasoned why saving system needs the mod… Wouldn't call that defending.
But to be honest, I didn't reach far spots in the game reviewers did, can't know yet if the game won't break apart like some of them say it does. So if you want to see some spitting, yea, wait till something gets on my nerves so hard it causes me to curse. So far nothing did, I mean seems that nothing respawns which is already thumb up from me.

The crosshair disappear when you use a bow? I currently have a crosshair up all the time but I'm still in the prologue and I haven't used a bow yet, just sword and fists.

I also haven't go any big issues outside some dialogue tree weirdness (initiating a new conversation with someone I just talked to resulted in redoing the previous conversation as if the events earlier happened differently). I'm also surprised the headbobbing and 1st person interaction animations that move the head aren't making me sick (it usually does). My KS backing isn't going to waste here.

Also, I like Nerdy Henry the protagonist. Saying that, I can see why the "my power fantasy!" crowd doesn't like him.

The thing I don't like much:
Time doesn't matter in the "first chapter" at all as it should be in RPG. You're free to do anything in the starting settlement without rushing anywhere. That part I like.
What I don't like? The hour doesn't change. It's always the same hour of a day.
Gives what?
A player could get a wrong feeling that this is normal RPG where you can postpone stuff and do them any later moment you want - but time does change and does matter later. Past "intro" if you don't do some quests during certain period of time, they'll resolve themselves in whatever way you might not like.

Why will you adore this? Because you can earn a hefty sum of cash by picking flowers and by killing chicken then selling them.
Cash? Buy everything! Okay okay, not everything, you can't carry much of stuff, so at least make sure your cash is high, you'll need the money. Hell I should probably do what you always do, restart the game and make sure all money from traders ends up in my pocket.
Just don't forget to check shop offers, there is a certain nice special item to purchase.
Additionally, repeatable actions do what? Improve your skills. Sure, it's not combat skills, but hey, you started as a peasant, so… No no, you can't milk… Erm, cows. Yea, dirty mind, sorry, but sadly you can't go past a few flirts in that first settlement. That virgin achievement suddenly doesn't seem impossible. What were they thinking!

Originally Posted by azarhal
I like Nerdy Henry the protagonist.

For some odd reason I do too. Writers gave him more charm than all Skyrim people together.

Caught myself reading codex a lot. Got lost in the game till 4:30AM, so 3 hours of sleep today. I think last time I had this was with Skyrim.

Very few bugs (10 hours in the game). I installed it on SSD, so no texture loading problems. There are stupid stairs with clipping bug in the first city, no way avoiding it. Memory leak, happens if you load the same save a lot. MY PC is 1080Ti on i4790K and 16Gb RAM.

Very nice touch regarding Alchemy. So I finally accumulated 60 gold for basic instructions lesson, haggled it to 50. Ran to the bench imagining untold profits from brewing potions only to discover that I can't read the recipe, well, because i'm illiterate. LOL.

I have to figure out the repairs, damage to items is very common and expensive to fix.

Lock picking sucks big-time. May be it's OK with game-pad but with mouse it's annoyingly hard.

I think what the game reviewer meant by "empty" is that the game world felt empty to him, in that there weren't enough people around, and also, specifically, that there wasn't enough flora and fauna around in the game world as he was exploring it. He actually mentioned that in the video. Like - birds, farm animals, deer, other wild animals in the wilderness that were missing - that kind of thing.

More of this would be fish swimming in the rivers/lakes that the player can see (maybe they have this already in the game) and bees buzzing around, along with the odd annoying fly every now and then…the wind blowing hard on occasion (infrequently), causing the trees and bushes and such to noticeably sway in the wind…all these small environmental type details, like as mentioned above, the Witcher 3 did so very well, are extremely important to the ambiance and atmosphere of the world. To make it "feel alive".

I don't think he meant that there are no places to discover or explore. More of a "the world feels too empty" type feeling.

This could be fixed by a future patch or mod, obviously. As could many of the bugs.

Originally Posted by Paul
The complaints about "empty" world come from people who are used to encountering bandits and dungeons every 30 meters like in Skyrim. Here the world uses much more realistic scale, it is not empty, it just uses different design philosophy than bethesda games.

That is pretty much it, towns have quite a few people around but you dont see many people in the wilderness. The wilderness is pretty barren and on occasion, you run across bandits and other people. I think that is fairly realistic.